Crime at Bedtime

The case of Brian Mwenda captivated Kenya and much of the world in 2023: the story of a confident young man in a well-cut suit who stood up in the High Court of Kenya, argued cases against trained lawyers, and, according to the viral legend, won every one, despite, the Law Society of Kenya alleges, never having been a lawyer at all. It is a story of two men with almost the same name. One, Brian Mwenda Ntwiga, was a genuine, fully qualified advocate whose professional identity sat dormant in an online database. The other, Brian Mwenda Njagi, allegedly hijacked that identity, took over the account, and walked into the highest courts in the land. When the Law Society of Kenya publicly declared him a masquerader, the nation split in two: lawyers were outraged, but much of the public celebrated him as a folk hero who had exposed the emptiness of professional gatekeeping. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Brian Mwenda case: the alleged scheme, the viral claim of twenty-six courtroom victories that the Law Society itself disputed, the real lawyer whose identity was stolen, the arrest, the not-guilty plea, and the genuinely uncomfortable questions the whole affair raised about credentials, competence, and who really gets to call themselves a professional. This is a case that, at the time of recording, remains unresolved, and we have told it as fairly as we can. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the advocate who wasn't.
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The Zodiac Killer ciphers are among the most famous unsolved codes in the world, and after more than fifty years, two of them have still never been cracked. Between 1969 and 1970, the unidentified serial killer who called himself the Zodiac sent four coded messages to San Francisco newspapers, each a block of strange symbols mixing letters, numbers, and astrological signs. He promised that his codes would reveal his identity. The first cipher, 408 characters long, was solved in about a week by a schoolteacher and his wife at their kitchen table, but it revealed only a chilling boast, not a name. The second, known as Z340, defeated the FBI, the NSA, and the world's best codebreakers for 51 years, until an international team of three amateurs finally cracked it in December 2020, one of them working through Melbourne's COVID lockdown on the far side of the world. And two ciphers remain unsolved to this day, including a 13-character message that the Zodiac introduced with the words "My name is". In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Zodiac ciphers: how the codes worked, who solved them, why the last two may be impossible to crack, and the genuinely haunting possibility that the name of a killer who was never caught has been sitting in plain sight, printed on a newspaper page, for more than half a century, in a code that no one has ever been able to read. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the unread message.
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The assassination of Judge John Wood on the 29th of May 1979 was the first killing of a sitting United States federal judge in the 20th century, and the man who pulled the trigger was a Texas contract killer named Charles Harrelson. On that spring morning in San Antonio, Texas, the 63-year-old federal judge known to defence lawyers as "Maximum John", for the harsh sentences he handed drug traffickers, walked out of his home to drive to work and was shot once in the back with a high-powered rifle. Behind the killing was a quarter-of-a-million-dollar contract, paid by an El Paso drug kingpin named Jamiel Chagra who was about to be tried in Judge Wood's courtroom. And behind the trigger was Charles Harrelson, a charming, remorseless hitman who had already killed before, and who would, during a cocaine-fuelled six-hour highway standoff a year later, confess not only to killing the judge but to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a claim he later retracted and which the FBI dismissed entirely. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Charles Harrelson case: the murder of Judge John Wood, the three-year FBI investigation, the drug kingpin who ordered the hit, the wild false confession, and the strange twist that the killer's own son, Woody Harrelson, would grow up to become one of the most famous actors in Hollywood while his father spent the rest of his life in a Supermax cell. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of Maximum John.
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The assassination of Gianni Versace on the 15th of July 1997 was the shocking end of one of the deadliest killing sprees in modern American history. On that summer morning, the world-famous Italian fashion designer walked home from a café to his Miami Beach mansion, Casa Casuarina, and was shot dead on his own front steps by a 27-year-old man named Andrew Cunanan. But Gianni Versace was not Andrew Cunanan's first victim. He was his fifth. Over the previous three months, Cunanan had murdered four other people across four American states: Jeffrey Trail, a decorated Navy veteran; David Madson, an interior designer and Cunanan's former boyfriend; Lee Miglin, a 72-year-old Chicago real estate tycoon; and William Reese, a New Jersey cemetery caretaker killed for nothing more than his pickup truck. By the time Cunanan killed Versace, he had already been on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for over a month, and he had been hiding in plain sight in Miami Beach, just four miles from the designer's mansion. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the complete story of the Versace murder and the Andrew Cunanan spree: the five victims, the nationwide manhunt, the funeral in Milan attended by Princess Diana and Elton John, the houseboat where the manhunt finally ended eight days later, and the questions about Cunanan's motive that have never been answered. This episode honours all five of the people who died, not only the most famous of them. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the steps of Casa Casuarina.
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The attack on Nancy Kerrigan on the 6th of January 1994 became one of the most notorious scandals in the history of the Olympic Games, and it involved one of the most famous rivalries in sport: Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. On that afternoon, at the United States Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, the reigning American champion Nancy Kerrigan finished a practice session and walked down a corridor toward her dressing room. A man stepped out from behind a television cameraman, swung a police baton at her right knee, and ran. The footage of Kerrigan sitting on the floor, clutching her leg and crying "Why? Why? Why me?", was broadcast around the world and has never been forgotten. Within days, the FBI had uncovered an extraordinary conspiracy. The attack had been planned and paid for by the ex-husband of Kerrigan's rival, the figure skater Tonya Harding, in an attempt to eliminate Kerrigan from the competition and clear Harding's path to the 1994 Winter Olympics. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Nancy Kerrigan attack and the Tonya Harding scandal: the four men who carried it out, the FBI investigation, the astonishing Olympic showdown at Lillehammer watched by 110 million Americans, the broken shoelace, the guilty pleas, the lifetime ban, and what became of both women in the decades since. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the whack heard round the world.
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